Now and Again Read Free Page B

describing their heroic deeds.
    “What about the women?” asked Tula.
    “Of course I’ll honor the famous women too—if there are any,” said Sammi.
    “Don’t forget Sandra Day O’Connor,” said Mrs. Winslow when Sammi bragged about how many influential men she knew. “She was the first female Supreme Court Justice, and once upon a time she was a Rainbow Girl too.”
    “I’m talking about local heroes,” said Sammi. “They can be men or women, but they have to be from around here.”
    Most of the proposals seemed derivative to Tula, while her own, which she kept secret even from Mrs. Winslow and her mother, had never been attempted before—never even thought of!—while still being in keeping with the spirit of the founding charter. Her idea would change the very structure of the order—or not really change it, but build on what was already there, making it better for future generations of Rainbow Girls and freeing them from their subjugation to men.
    From the time she was a middle schooler, Tula had seen how Sammi and her friends curried favor with boys—some of them in a very direct and obvious way. Even Sammi, who was athletic and strong and mostly resistant to peer pressure, rolled the waistband of her skirt so that the slightest lifting breeze would have shown the edges of her panties if Sammi had worn the kind of panties Tula wore underneath the pleated skirts that even the updated version of the Rainbow Handbook said were supposed to come within two inches of the knees.
    But Tula didn’t. Tula, who was modest inside and out, could only marvel as Sammi teased the boys by flexing her abdominal muscles and arching her back. Even when Tula stood alone in front of her full-length mirror, she couldn’t twitch in a way that made her skirt swing from side to side the way Sammi’s did, so she watched uneasily as the boys and girls paired off and wondered how their behavior fit with their avowed submission to a patriarchal religion. Tula herself had sworn fealty to the same God and Savior, but in her heart she revered the Virgin Mother above all other deities and saints. Who was more pure than Mary, the mother of Jesus? She knew from the stories her own mother told her when they lay together at night, unable to sleep because the full moon, which her mother said was male, was pulling at the female tides within them the way men had always pulled at women, causing the tides to shift the way women had always shifted—even physically fit women like Sammi shifted, women with rock-hard abdominal muscles and intelligence. They all shifted like the tide the minute a handsome man winked in their direction.
    After such a night, it was a relief when the sun rose, restoring to earth the female principle of sunlight and, even Tula had to admit, fertility. When Tula had mentioned the gravitational effect of the male moon to her benefactress, Mrs. Winslow had smiled indulgently and said, “You have it backwards, darling. The moon is the female principle. It is we women who affect the tides of men!”
    Tula was still trying to figure out which made more sense, but whichever it was, she knew she owed it to the Virgin Mother, who smiled down at her from the niche above her bed, to resist the male principle for as long as she could. So she said no when Will Rayburn asked her out. She said no out of principle, but she also said it because Will Rayburn scared her. Or it wasn’t really Will who scared her, it was the feeling of the tides within her shifting whenever Will walked by.
    1.5 Maggie
    T he cherry trees on Main Street were blooming big and pink when Maggie decided she could no longer continue in her current line of work. “You’ll lose your pension,” warned her friend Misty Mills, and True Cunningham added, “You don’t actually shoot the bullets, do you? Technically, you don’t even make them.”
    “Bullets,” said Maggie as the three friends stepped from the cool aluminum shadow cast by the munitions plant